


little systems

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, what if things were even worse?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-03-11
Packaged: 2018-03-17 08:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3522122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year after the Helicarriers fall, Natasha finds out who the Winter Soldier was. He was buried a year ago with the other victims of the Insight incident, but they had no name for him then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	little systems

It came slowly, like a sunrise on a day with heavy clouds. It came to Natasha in the morning after Fury brought a flash drive, just like the one that had started everything last year, and left it on Natasha’s breakfast bar.

There had been a lot of files buried deeper than the servers in the Triskelion; they'd found HYDRA facilities underground in three places in D.C. alone so far. One of them had been disused and full of dust, while another had a jacket in it that Natasha recognized as belonging to Rumlow.

But each of these secret places held hoards of data. Encrypted, rusty, but of value. Decoding it was the easier part; someone had to sort through all these sunken HYDRA shipwrecks for the scraps of treasure in them.

There was too much for Fury to dig through on his own, so he gave some of it, sometimes, to Natasha. Natasha was comfortable with everything.

She made a habit: she only read through the HYDRA buried treasure in the morning, on quiet Sunday-feeling mornings. In yoga pants and a t-shirt, while holding a mug of tea, she curled up on her couch and read through the files on a laptop. She kept her phone by her side so that she could call Fury if she needed to. And after the morning was done, she shut down that laptop and put it away, out of sight until the next time.

On this gray morning, Natasha stopped scrolling through the file on her screen and said, “Oh god.”

She Googled a few things, pulled up Wikipedia once or twice, then found a History Channel documentary uploaded on YouTube.

Ten minutes into the documentary, she picked up the phone and called Sam.

***

When she opened the door to him, Sam was wearing a leather jacket and the same worried face that Steve wore sometimes. They had the same worried face, and both of them wore leather jackets, and both of them jumped out of planes without parachutes. But the difference was that when Sam did that, he was wearing his wings. 

“You okay?” Sam said.

Natasha looked out into the hallway, because she always did, and then she closed the door behind him and said, “I found something in the HYDRA files.”

Sam looked at her for a second and then said, “Is Steve coming?”

“No,” she said. “You want some tea?”

Because Sam was a therapist, which was the opposite of a spy, he said, “Natasha, what’s this about?”

Natasha pulled her cardigan around herself and, for a moment, tried not to be a spy. “It’s sort of a Catch-22,” she said. “You might not want to know. But you can’t make the decision unless you know. And Steve can’t know; you’ll understand once I show you.”

“Is it something that’ll hurt people?” Sam said. “Something we have to stop?”

Natasha went over to the breakfast bar and turned on the kettle. “No. It’s already stopped,” she said. “Steve’s the only person it can hurt.”

Sam took this on levelly, as he had taken on the information that two wanted fugitives were tapping on his door. “All right,” he said. “What kind of tea do you have?”

Since it was all she had, she made chamomile for both of them. Then Sam sat next to her on the couch and she opened up her laptop again to show him a photograph from the buried treasure files: a man’s face.

“Jesus,” Sam said.

It was only the face of a sleeping man, or perhaps a man lying awake with his eyes closed. The picture had been taken from above, it seemed, so that the camera was directly opposing the face: too close for comfort. The man’s hair was long, and dry, and fell carelessly to the flat surface on which he lay. But something about the mouth, the closed eyes, the form of that blank expression was awful to look at. Something too slight to see exactly—but, clear as day, every inch of that face was inscribed with torment.

“Who is he?” Sam said.

Natasha clicked: another photo, black and white this time and sourced from a history blog. Steve was in this one, too. She had never seen him smile as he was smiling in the image. She’d never seen him look so young as he did there. He was smiling at the man next to him, who seemed slightly surprised to be looking directly into a camera.

“Bucky Barnes?” Sam said. He sat back a little. “You’re—when’s the other picture from?”

“March 2008,” Natasha said.

“How could he have survived? Steve said he died. He said he fell into a ravine.”

“Another super-soldier serum test subject,” Natasha said. “Apparently it worked better for him than most others.”

With the roughness of shock in his voice, Sam said, “You’re telling me Bucky Barnes was a HYDRA prisoner for—oh, my God, decades. Is he—where is he now?”

Natasha switched to another scanned image: still visibly the same man, but the first face, the awful one, rather than the second, and now the photograph was frosted over, as though it had been taken through an icy windowpane. She wished Sam could read Russian, because the words were right there, scrawled over the picture in someone’s messy handwriting. But he couldn’t, so she said, “It says _Codename: Winter Soldier._ ”

Sam’s hand covered his mouth. Then he said, “You’re sure?” She knew that that didn’t mean he didn’t trust her. It was just something that people had to say.

“I’m sure. They knew,” Natasha said. “Don’t tell Steve.”

“I’m not going to,” Sam said. When she turned to look at him, he looked tired and said, “I can’t do that to him.”

He was telling the truth, so Natasha said, “Okay.”

They kept looking at the screen, at the icy face. “Why’d you tell me?” Sam asked. “If you thought I was going to tell Steve.”

“I have to nuke the files after I show Fury,” she said. “I guess I thought you ought to know too. You fought him as well.” Sam had already told her the story of how the Winter Soldier had appeared on the helicarrier from nowhere, like a storm come to devastate everything in its path.

Sam nodded slowly. “You know where he’s buried?” he asked.

She did. There had been a few unidentified bodies found in the wreckage of the Triskelion. They’d been cremated and buried in an unnoticeable corner of an unremarkable cemetery—not Arlington, of course, but the same convenient place where Nick Fury’s current headstone stood. The Winter Soldier’s body was with them, buried in a grave that said his name was unknown—except for his arm, which had been kept for research purposes.

*** 

It was a peaceful summer day when Natasha put on her best plain black dress and picked Sam up outside his house. Sam had worn a suit.

They drove while listening to the radio—mostly commercials, with a few recent hits that Natasha couldn’t name. It was hard to keep track of the ephemera of the present moment when you spent your days delving through the past.

 They came to the graveyard, and Natasha led the way to a plain marker in the grass. If anything was left of the Winter Soldier, it was under her feet, Natasha knew, and yet she wasn’t sure if that meant there was anything left of Bucky Barnes there at all. She hadn’t known the man, had only heard Steve’s halting stories (and Steve never said most of what he meant). But when Steve said Bucky’s name, it fell from his lips fast, thoughtlessly, like he’d spent his whole life saying it every day.

 But regardless of Bucky Barnes, Natasha had been a prisoner within herself once, and she had read the Winter Soldier files. If it had been her mind, her body that was detailed so precisely in the HYDRA procedures—better to be nothing at all, she thought.

 “Thank God Steve never knew,” Sam said at last.

 Three shots in Steve’s stomach, and he’d been cracking jokes with Sam in the hospital an hour after he woke up.

 “Would you have wanted to know? If it was Riley?” Natasha said.

 “If he was trying to kill me?” Sam said. There was the ghost of one of his dimples. “Guess I’m supposed to say no.”

 Natasha remembered: Steve had told her a story once, when they were on the run. About how Steve’d been sick in tenth grade, and Bucky had once written an entire essay for him because Steve couldn’t do it. Then it turned out that the essay Bucky wrote for Steve got a better grade than the one Bucky wrote for himself.

 Bucky had brushed it off, but Steve hadn’t been able to abide it. In the end, Steve went to tell the teacher that he cheated and practically asked her to give him a zero on the assignment instead. Then Bucky had refused to speak to him for a week because of all the time he’d spent writing Steve’s essay, and for nothing.

 “If Steve hadn’t killed him, he would have killed Steve,” Natasha said.

 “I don’t know if Steve knows he died,” Sam said. “The Winter Soldier, I mean.”

 They stayed for a few minutes longer, even though they didn’t know him, because no-one else was ever going to come and visit that grave. Bucky Barnes’ headstone at Arlington, yes, but not this one.

 Then they went home, and Natasha destroyed the files beyond all hope of recovery, and then they went out to a movie and didn’t talk about Steve or the graveyard. But Fury had texted Natasha earlier saying that a Hydra facility had been uncovered in Ireland, and there would be more files there, and more at the next base, and the next. The secret of the Winter Soldier’s identity would never really die; secrets never did. She would have to keep chasing it. She would have to remember not to forget.

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment!
> 
> Come say hi to me at fmowrites.tumblr.com, and if you found this fic through a rec, please tell me! I love to hear about being recced.


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